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Ofsted Talks

By: Ofsted
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  • The official Ofsted podcast.
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  • Serious youth violence: not just a 'city problem'

    Serious youth violence: not just a 'city problem'
    Dec 16 2024
    Ofsted's report into multi-agency responses to serious youth violence: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/multi-agency-responses-to-serious-youth-violence-working-together-to-support-and-protect-children Safer London's report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/children-and-families-experiences-of-multi-agency-support-when-impacted-by-serious-youth-violence https://saferlondon.org.uk/ Briony Balsom Hello everyone, and welcome to this edition of Ofsted Talks. I'm Briony Balsam, and this time, we're focusing on serious youth violence and our recently released joint report. We released a joint targeted area inspection report, which we call a JTAI, on serious youth violence on the 20th of November, that report had a lengthy title for a weighty subject. It was called 'Multi agency responses to serious youth violence, working together to support and protect children'. Later in the podcast we'll be joined by Carly Adams Elias from Safer London, where she's director of practice, to talk about their work around serious youth violence, but first to explore with reports and findings, we're joined by some of those who contributed to it. We have Helen Davis, who's head of thematic and joint inspection at His Majesty's Inspectorate of Probation. Ade Solarin, the inspection lead for child protection at His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue services. Hello everyone. Jess Taylor Byrne, who is the Children's Services operations manager at the Care Quality Commission. Hi there. Hi everyone. And Wendy Ghaffar, who is Ofsted specialist advisor on cross remit safeguarding. Wendy, if I could come to you first so we can say a little bit about the scale of the problem. Many might assume it's a city issue, but is that really the case? Wendy Ghaffar No, it's definitely not the case. It's not just a city problem. I think we were shocked as a group of inspectorates to find that in all of the areas we visited, there were many children, including children as young as 11, carrying knives for their own protection. And in some of the areas, and for some children, it was absolutely the norm to carry a knife, often, not always, but often that was what children saw as a way of protecting themselves. And if you look at our report, at the beginning of that report, we talk about a very young teenage boy who was chased by a group of older teenagers in his local area, and he knew that those teenagers were carrying knives, and so he started carrying a knife because he saw that as the only way to protect himself. And we heard about children who were too frightened to leave their own homes, children not attending school because they were so fearful. And this is happening in small towns, out in the countryside, and we think that social media plays a role as well. If we look at the work of the youth endowment fund, they surveyed 7500 children last year, and one in four of those children had either been a victim of violence or perpetrated violence, and children also spoke about seeing real life episodes of violence on social media so they might see something that's happened in their locality on social media, and that's feeding into this sense of fear. And we don't think that adults are really sufficiently aware of this problem. And the other thing that came through is the impact that this has not just on children who are directly involved, but on their brothers and sisters, on their friends, on communities, on schools. So there's a kind of ripple effect when there's an incident and it's impacting on children's general well being, their sense of safety. I think we also need to think about the links there are with county lines and criminal exploitation. So some of this, not all of it, is happening in that context of county lines, which, as I'm sure people are aware, often organized crime gangs are forcing children to carry drugs out into the countryside, into smaller towns, and very often forcing children to carry knives. There's some groups of children who are particularly badly effective or more vulnerable, and that includes children with special educational needs and some children from some particular ethnic groups, and particularly with children who've got special educational needs. We know that nationally, there are delays in those children getting assessments, and delays in them getting the support they need, and we think this is actually putting them at increased risk of serious youth violence. Briony Balsom Thanks, Wendy and you mentioned the wider community impacts as well. I wonder whether anyone would like to come in and talk talk to that a little? Wendy Ghaffar We saw some very strong examples of where voluntary organizations were kind of harnessing, if you like, capacity within local communities to protect children, to offer other opportunities for children, to provide a venue for children and families, to provide different opportunities for children and families. But we ...
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    32 mins
  • Young Offender Institutions: a decade of decline

    Young Offender Institutions: a decade of decline
    Oct 2 2024
    Here's the report discussed in this episode of the podcast: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thematic-review-of-the-quality-of-education-in-young-offender-institutions-yois Mark Leech 0:03 Hello. Welcome to Ofsted Talks. My name is Mark Leech, and today I'm hosting a conversation about young offender institutions, or YOIs for short. I'm very pleased to be joined by not one, but two of His Majesty's chief inspectors. We have Sir Martyn Oliver, His Majesty's Chief Inspector here at Ofsted, and we have Charlie Taylor, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons. Now both are here because the inspection of young offender institutions involves both His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons, HMIP and Ofsted. Also with us from Ofsted is Maria Navarro, one of Ofsted specialists in this area, and heavily involved in the report we're going to be talking about today. Welcome everyone. We'll get on to the report I mentioned in a moment. But first, let's talk a bit about young offender institutions and how they work. Charlie, before you joined HMIP, you were Chair of the Youth Justice Board, so this is an area you know really well. Could you give us a bit of a background, please, about YOIs and the children who they cater for? Charlie Taylor 1:05 Yes, certainly there are four YOIs in the country. One is private sector, the other three are public sector. They house about around 400 children at the moment, which is a dramatic reduction from when I did my review in 2016 when there are about 1500 and an even more dramatic reduction from the the early 2000s when there are about three and a half thousand children locked up in England and Wales. The age of kids who end up in a YOI is 15 to 18, but the vast majority of them are about 16 and 17, with most being 17 at the moment, because of the prison population crisis, they're also housing more 18 year olds than they would have done in the past. So in the past, unless you had a very short time to serve, you would move on into an adult prison. But they're now hanging on to 18 year olds for longer as well, which represents a challenge. Mark Leech 1:57 And YOIs do they cater for boys as well as girls? Or is it all boys? Charlie Taylor 2:02 Well, there are a few girls in YOIs due to some anomalies, because of the closure of parts of the youth custody sector, particularly secure training centers. And what that meant is that provision had to be made for a small amount of very vulnerable girls who who were unable to be placed either in secure children's homes or or into secure training centers. So Weatherby YOI, up in Yorkshire, has a handful of girls there, and certainly that's an issue we've raised many concerns about during our inspection reports over the last couple of years, and in terms of the sort of the way YOIS operate. Mark Leech 2:43 Obviously, you've mentioned secure training centers, then and secure children's homes. What's different about the YOIs, would it be more recognizable as a sort of prison environment, or is it more of a children's home environment? Charlie Taylor 2:54 No, certainly it's much more of a prison environment. So the populations are higher, around 150 or so in somewhere like Weatherby, around 120 in someone like Wellington and in Feltham in West London, again, around 120 something like that. So they have a much more prisony feel, unfortunately, than than secure children's homes, the secure school, or even, indeed, secure, secure training centers. And I think that's been one of the criticisms for many years, is actually that they often appear to do a better job of preparing kids for a life in prison, rather than a life on the outside going on and being successful when they leave. Mark Leech 3:36 That's probably a good point to bring in Martyn from Ofsted. Our involvement might come as a bit of a surprise to many people. Obviously, we do have that role in in adult prisons as well. Could you tell us a bit more about why and how Ofsted are involved in YOI inspections? Sir Martyn Oliver 3:49 Well, Ofsted works with a number of providers across the 92,000 people that we inspect and regulate and in YOIs, and indeed in prisons. We're really grateful to work with Charlie and his team at HMIP and we look very specifically at the education that children receive in these settings. So for example, in YOIs, we've just done a thematic joint review with Charlie's team, and we've looked very specifically at leadership and the quality of education, and it's actually quite a damning report, where between the two of us, we find that there's been a decade long decline in the quality of education for our most vulnerable children, and when you think about the very need for rehabilitation, clearly education has a massively important role. And the fact that we find that there are systemic failings, it's a really concerning moment that I think Charlie and I now say, this needs to say, enough is enough. This ...
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    24 mins
  • Good decisions: children with complex needs in children’s homes

    Good decisions: children with complex needs in children’s homes
    Aug 21 2024
    Host Mark Leech listens in to Lisa Pascoe, deputy director (regulation and social care policy), Helen Humphries (specialist adviser for residential care) and Jenny Bird (research lead) as they discuss the findings from our recent research report ‘Good decisions: children with complex needs in children’s homes’. Read the report 'Good decisions: children with complex needs in children's homes' Read the blogs: Providing good experiences for children with complex needs Children with complex needs in children's homes Transcript Mark: Hello and welcome to Ofsted Talks. My name is Mark Leech, and in this episode, we're going to be hearing about children with complex needs and what that means to local authorities, children's services and those working with children who live in children's homes. Earlier this year, we published a research report called good decisions children with complex needs in children's homes, and I listened in to colleagues from our social care policy and research teams as they discussed the findings. Lisa: I'm Lisa Pascoe. I'm the Deputy Director here at Ofsted with responsibility for regulation and social care policy and I'm joined today by Helen, our specialist advisor for residential care, and Jenny, our research lead. Jenny, let's start with you. It would be really helpful to set out for people why we did this research. Jenny: Yeah, absolutely. So, it follows on really from a piece we'd done previously, which was looking at local authorities plans for sufficiency. And from that piece of work, we could see that local authorities were really struggling to find supportive homes for children who have complex needs. So we wanted to look at that even more. We knew as well that stakeholders were concerned about children's homes not accepting referrals for children with complex needs. We'd heard some things about them holding out for children who present fewer risks and, sort of preferring to take referrals for those children. And we heard as well about some concerns around the potential impact it could have on Ofsted inspections. So we really wanted this research to look into that further and to highlight good practice that was already out there, as well as the challenges that still exist, and what action could potentially be taken, either across the sector or by ourselves. Lisa: So how did we make it work? Jenny, what did we actually do? Jenny: So we used a two-phase design in this research. We started off at the start of 2023 with a survey that went out to all local authority Children's Services and all registered children's homes, and we asked them things like what they think complex needs means, what happens when they try to find places or are approached with a referral, and what the facilitators and the barriers are to finding good homes for children. Lisa: If I remember rightly, Jenny, didn't we publish something after phase one? Jenny: We did, yeah. We published a blog in around May time to highlight the findings of that survey in more detail. Lisa: And then we moved into phase two. Jenny: We did, yeah. So that built on phase one, and it was made up of two parts. The main bulk of the work was case studies. We'd completed 10 case studies, which we identified through working with three different local authorities across two regions. And in those we spoke to people who were involved in making decisions about children's care or in providing the care itself, as well as children. To supplement those, we also ran some focus groups with other groups of professionals who are involved in the care of children with complex needs. So that was people from the Association for Virtual School Heads, as well as staff who work in local authority commissioning. And we also held a focus group with some of our own Ofsted inspectors as well to talk about how they experience inspections when they're going to homes where children with complex needs are living. Lisa: I think one of the things, Helen, was about this use of the phrase complex needs, wasn't it? I mean, it camouflages what's actually happening for children. Helen: Yes, it's a global term that I think is on unhelpful and categorizes children into this uncertainty which is complex needs, instead of actually saying this child's particular need is related to their mental health, or, because of that this is what happens and this is how their behaviour is demonstrated. It just draws children into a classification that actually isn't helpful and we'd really prefer not to have that phrase bandied about and used so much. Lisa: Yeah, I mean, I think there was some common themes. Weren't there. There were certainly children who needed help from a variety of professionals. They needed specialist help from, you know, from health services. They needed specialist input and there was certainly some common kind of characteristics of the children Jenny, as well wasn't there in terms of children, particularly children with serious mental health needs, ...
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    24 mins

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